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Buck Buchholz at the piano. on u\1\, 59 W. 44th St., New York. 840-6800 PRINCE ALFONSO VON HOHENLOHE FOUNDER OF THE FAMOUS MARBELlA CLUB OF SPAIN, INTRODUCES ... THE NEW CARIBBEAN "., CHOICE OF THE INTERNA TIONAL SET W =: Marbella Club AT DRAGON BAY, PORT ANTONIO JAMAICA OIleot='1'htf"Lead.mtfHotels of thtfWorld For reservations and new color brochure USA P.R & US V.I. (800) 223-6800 toll free N.Y. State. Hawaii & Alaska (212) 838-3110 collect - T ALK-SHOW calls were not the only measure of public opinion on the subway shooting. A formal poll on the subject, taken by the Daily News and the local ABC television station, was published In the News on January 6th. It indicated that the sup- port for the vigilante was not as universal as had been thought. Just under half-forty-nine per cent-of those polled said that they "tended to approve" of his having shot the four youths. Fifty-eight per cent disap- proved of his being charged with at- tempted murder. On the other hand, seventy-eight per cent believed that he should not be commended for his actions or treated as a hero. The poll had been taken on the day Goetz was brought back from New Hampshire and before many New Yorkers under- stood some aspects of the case-in- cluding, for example, the fact that he had shot two of the youths in the back. ("John Wayne would never shoot an outlaw in the back," the Reverend Herbert Daughtry, head of the Na- tional Black United Front, said in a sermon in his Brooklyn church a week or so later.) On the day the poll was taken, a News editorial headlined "RAGE MUST NOT WIN"-emphasiz- ing that the screwdrivers the youths carried were apparently not sharpened or visible to Goetz and that he did not know of the youths' criminal records- asked whether the huge and generally favorable public response to what he had done was "an overdue mass declaration that the criminal justice system has failed to do its job" or "an outburst of deep, hateful, not-so-latent racism. " F rom the start, public officials and others who were asked to comment on the subway shooting had made a strong effort to avoid implying that it could be seen primarily as a white- against-black confrontation in this al- ready badly polarized city. It was fre- quently-and accurately-pointed out that blacks were as angry as whites at subway marauders, and that local blacks are the victims of more crimes than whites. Nevertheless, there were what-if questions that many New Yorkers tried to avoid asking them- selves, since the answers might be painful. Les Payne, the national editor of the suburban paper Newsday, who is black, asked, "What would have been the public reaction if, instead of JANUAR.Y 28,1985 what police described as a 'golden blond,' a black passenger... had pulled an unlicensed pistol and shot four black teen-agers?" His conclusion was that it would have been a "one- day story" and treated with indiffer- ence. He also asked the even more painful question "What if the gunman had been black and his victims four white teen-agers?" His answer was "The media would have dragged its cameras to the scene and doggedly pursued the best attainable version of the truth. In the Goetz case, the media dispensed spoon-fed police details." Yet in discussions of the failure of the local criminal-justice system that many saw as justification for Goetz's actions the fact that the system had, to a de- gree, worked in the instance of his 1981 mugging was generally over- looked. After Goetz was attacked and some electrical equipment was taken from him, a policeman chased and captured one of his attackers; the two others got away, but his property was recovered. Eventually, the captured robber was convicted on a minor as- sault charge (Goetz, however, was ap parently not informed of this) and served four months of a six-month sentence; he was arrested in 1983 for other crimes and sentenced to three- to-nine years in an upstate prison. As for cases in which the races of the principals are reversed, there is a sig- nificant example here, although, ex- cept in the black community, the crime did not arouse anything like the storm of emotion that the Goetz shooting did. In June, 1982, a black transit worker named Willie Turks, on his way home from work, was beaten to death in Brooklyn by a gang of young white toughs. Eventually, three of them were convicted, though the fact that even the harshest of the convic- tions was only for manslaughter rather than murder is still a source of bitter- ness for many local blacks. Still, while most local public officials formally rejected the judgment that racism was a dominant motive in the shooting, another conclusion rose to the surface in unguarded moments. Among the officials who have tried to downplay racism in the city is Police Commis- sioner Ward, who is the first black to have been named to that position. Although many blacks had hailed his appointment as signalling that they would now have an important voice in city government, in his year in office Ward has been a strong team player in the department, not even venturing to reprimand a group of white police